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by orphan_account



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Elysium, F/M, M/M, Memories, Mother-Son Relationship, Second person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 14:37:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1986687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elysium: the place where souls go, after death. You are a child still, when you first hear of it. -- (Hunith/Balinor; Hunith/Merlin [mother/son]; Merlin/Arthur)</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

> A little thing I wrote for the Merlin drabble community over at LJ. It's the extended version with the bit in brackets at the end; I had to cut it short for the comm because of the word limit, so I'll post the entire thing here.
> 
> It's a little confusing, yes. Still, I hope the idea behind it will somehow become clear at the end.

Later, you will wonder where your mother got these tales from. You will ask Gaius, when you are older. “Folklore from the Southeast,” he will say. “A paradise of trees and shades, and fields of gold, where there is music everywhere.”

Now, your mother tells you when you are both sitting in front of the fire of your small home. Later, you will remember none of this: that it is winter, that the wind howls outside. That the blanket around you is scratchy but warm, that the world is frozen still underneath an aegis of white.

What you will remember, very clearly: the peace in your mother’s eyes. Not worry for food or clean water or shelter for warmth. Just peace. Serene, and absolute.

“It is a place of joy,” she begins. “The people there all know and love each other. It is a big family, like you and Will and I. They will play music for us, in fields of gold, where the crops are alive and abundant, so we will never have to go hungry. It is warm, all day, so you can go swim in the rivers and sit in the shades of the trees. Sometimes it will rain, at midday, to refresh the crops and the fruit trees. And it will refresh the grass, too. The grass,” she says, sighing low and dreamy. “Such green, green grass….”

She looks far away. It makes you feel frightened and alone, like she has gone somewhere else and has left you here. Under the blanket, your hands find hers, hold on tight.

It makes her blink, once, twice. Again. “Yes, the grass will be green. So green, my love, that I will despair from the stains on your trousers that you will bring home to me,” she laughs, then, the moment gone, and she is back with you in the place where the soles of your feet are cold on the stone floor, where your bellies hurt from hunger with only the sparse broth for supper.

_Yes_ , you think, that night, your head pillowed on your mother’s breast. You stare out from underneath the slit of the blanket at the bright white of snow behind your window and think: _yes, the place she was speaking about is a good place. I want to see green grass again._

The winter is very long.

*

As winter persists, she does not tell you about the place again. Will is there all the time at your mother’s insistence, and she tells other tales at night to help you both sleep as you huddle close to her to soak up the warmth of her body.

At last, winter fades to spring, and you know it will be summer very soon when your body rejoices in the first light of the morning sun, warm and welcome. Will, stubbornly proud, withdraws to his own home again. You think you understand the desire to sleep in your dead parents’ bed. The memory of their absence is better than no memory at all.

You have almost forgotten about the place when your mother comes to sit down beside you at the nearby riverbank, one day. You are looking for the small white stones that glint in the sun. Your hands are cool with water and dirty with slush.

You both watch the water flow in the river, rhythmic, ceaseless. You realise that your knees hurt from crouching on the ground all morning, and let yourself fall back on your bottom.

"Oh, Merlin." You glance sideways at your mother and find her looking pointedly at your knees. Your trousers are dirty, and your mother's face is stern. "What did I tell you about playing in the grass, again?"

"I don't know," you say, cheeky. "I didn't hear anything."

"Yes, I bet you did not," your mother agrees. She groans. "Washing that out will be--"

Before she finishes speaking, your eyes glow golden and the stains vanish. "Now you won't have to," you say, grinning widely.

You expect the swat to the back of your head when it comes.

"Merlin!" She doesn't tell you to be careful, because she knows it’s a lost cause. Instead she says, "No more apples for you this week," and that makes you pout more than anything else she could have done. You don't mind, though. Your mother doesn't mean it, not really. Her lips are curled, her eyes bright.

You continue watching the river. The silence is pleasant, your mother’s fingers stroking through your hair, rhythmic, ceaseless. Like the river, you think, because in that moment it feels like forever, like your mother’s fingers will never stop moving in your hair.

“You know,” she murmurs when you are so drowsy with contentment that you almost miss her speaking. “You know, in this place, you can do your magic before everybody. You won’t have to hide, to keep it secret.”

_This place_. You cannot remember. You glance to the side, see her bare toes curled in the grass. You watch for a moment. The grass is green around your mother’s pale skin. Green. Then you remember.

“Oh,” you say. “That place. Elay… lisum?”

“Yes. Elysium.” She waits until your eyes meet hers. “You could do your magic there, freely,” she says, quietly.

All you do is shrug. Doing magic freely does not really endear that place to you. You’re still young enough to believe that a secret is something special, something great; young enough to believe it could never be something crushing, isolating, damning.

She averts her eyes, then, stares back out at the river. Her hand falls from your hair into her lap. It happens like last time, you think; now she will go away again, wherever it is that she goes.

But she doesn’t go alone.

“You could do magic there,” she says, murmuring, barely more than a breath. Like it’s a dream, and by speaking up it would vanish in a puff of nothing. “You could do magic there, and show your father.”

“ _Father_?” you say in a rush, all disinterest forgotten. You sit up, eyes wide, eager. She never talks about your father. “I could--I could see father there?”

She looks at you for a moment, eyes remote. You have the feeling there’s something she isn’t telling you, but the wild pucker of your heart drowns out everything else but father. _Father._

“Yes, you could see him,” she admits softly. “We could all live there together.”

And this time, when she goes far away, you go right with her. She speaks of your father, of how he would take you to the fields in the morning, teach you woodcarving. And the more she speaks, the fiercer the fire in your chest becomes, and you think you understand how and why she only speaks of this with you, never with Will around.

It’s the same Will does with you; you’re allowed to sleep in his own bed at his place, but never in his parents’ old one. You can’t quite put your finger on it, can’t quite put it in words, but you feel this is something of the chest and stomach, something wild, something violent, something not to be shared. Something _yours_.

You won’t remember this precise day, won’t remember how this place, Elysium, has suddenly become your refuge, your sanctuary. You won’t remember why.

The reasons will all blur underneath the vision of a home that shaded parks and the echo of music in golden fields will evoke: the vision of a family, whole, not broken. Together, not apart.

A home.

You are still a child then, and you don’t understand.

*

(Much, much later, you will understand, when you are a child no longer.

You will need the vision of peace that your mother spoke about during the evenings of your childhood so fervently now more than ever; there will be a dragon and a prince, and the weight of so many things that you will fear will snap your spine in two like a twig.

You will seek Elysium out in the thick tomes of Camelot’s libraries, needing to know more than you do so you will be able to anchor the mere imagination of that place as something tight and secure within your mind, so you will be able to return to it and draw strength from it, should you need it.

And when you will read it then, for the first time, you will remember the peace in your mother’s eyes, and you will remember her saying, “You could see your father there.”

And you will be a child no longer, and you will understand, now, in this much, much later, when you read: “Elysium, also called The Isle of the Blessed, is the place souls go to in death.”

The place of death.

And you will think back to all the whispers you will have heard then, whispers from old, twisted, honest tongues, of the sleep that the King shall have on the Isle on the Blessed, the King that you will serve, by then, the King that you will love, by then, more dearly than you will ever have loved anything or anyone else in your life.

Except you will then realise that this is not sleep but _death_ , that your King will be dead, and you will think, no, no, no, _no_ , and the sheer panic will tear out the very memory of peace in your mother’s eyes, of the hope, the foolish, frail hope of seeing your father again, it will tear out everything, and Elysium will become something hated, something dreaded, something despised. You will push it away, Elysium, you will push it away, even though it will be hard, because there will be this, too:

Your favourite spell will still be conjuring up blue butterflies that glow in the night, but by then, your magic will have turned twisted, and you will have killed with it. You will have become a murderer, and you will never regret it once despite the tracks of tears on your cheeks, despite how all the butterflies then will be ruby red, like their wings have been dipped in blood.

The dragon will have become a fate, and the prince will have become a King, and your spine will have bent under the weight of destiny, and secrets will have become the very crushing, isolating, damning thing you could never imagine them to be, and you will feel so much like a stranger to yourself that most days you will feel like a ghost haunting the castle, looking for something you forgot long ago.

And you will claw at the sheets and scream your ire and loss at the night sky in a forest far away, because there is no safe, secret place left to return to. It cannot be Elysium anymore, you will refuse to let it be Elysium now; it cannot be this twisted, twisted place. Elysium is the Isle of the Blessed, where they will lay down your King, where he will not sleep but _die_ , and you will sacrifice all your happy memories for this, your mother’s peace and the memory of your father, because--

because there will be golden hair, and a voice rough-thick and grumpy with sleep at sunrise, and capable hands and strong wrists, and a foolishly brave, achingly noble and heart-wrenchingly insecure heart.

Because he will be there, and he will be called Arthur, and he will say your name in a way that will make your heart unfurl as though it has waited for this specific intonation from those lips entire centuries.

Because by then, home will already have become a person, not a place.)


End file.
